Havana Noir by Achy Obejas

first, I ultimately answered that I could not travel because of my mother’s illness. And I apologized, as though my mother’s death were a mere inconvenience disrupting his magnum plans. He has never written again.
    For those neighbors who don’t sign on to either of those two theories, there’s a more general option, which doesn’t really pin anything concrete on me. According to this one, I want to be free so I can do whatever I want, like sleep with lots of men and women; drink until I fall on my ass; smoke marijuana and take pills and watch a lot of porno films on giant screens with quadraphonic sound. In other words, to manifest this dark side which my ex-neighbors insist on having seen in me since I was a little girl. They’re convinced that my mother not having left for paradise yet is the only reason I haven’t descended into hell.
    Now that we’re without them—they’re far away, furnishing other homes and surely missing Vedado and its excellent bus routes (on which no buses actually pass) and its movie theaters (always without air-conditioning in the summer) and Coppelia (with its serpentine lines) and the Malecón (which is the only real populated part of Vedado, because it’s free)—my mother and I are quite content.
    She doesn’t know that the neighbors have moved out and so she innocently enjoys the magical breeze that has blown away the radio and its shrill music, the hammering at 6 in the morning, dogs barking all through the night, fights between parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives.
    A little after the neighbors left, our phone was disconnected. I thought God was on my side. In any case, I’d had it off the hook for most of the last few weeks. That was how I had avoided giving a health report every five minutes to the curious; the worst part was hearing their comforting words and the sense that, behind them, there was such relief that it was my mother and not theirs who was about to ride with Charon.
    When they cut the gas, I started using the two-burner hotplate we kept for emergencies. My mother was eating less every day. So when we finally lost our electricity too, there wasn’t much to worry about.
    I fired the nurse, who cried a bit as she showed me how to give my mother her shots, regulate the oxygen pump, take her blood pressure, and raise the Fowler bed to the right height so my mother could get up. I also learned to smile when I wanted to cry and to convince myself that she was going to die anyway.
    We have been very happy here, my mother and I, absolute rulers of this beautiful building in ruins, I thought as I left the terrace to answer my mother’s call on the last night in my neighborhood. When I went back, the city was black. I imagined that the tourists on the cruise ship—the only line of lights on the water—must have a very interesting view. What must it be like to face a city completely in the dark?
    When my mother called me—thank God the building’s empty or the neighbors’ noises would have never let me hear her, especially now that her voice is not much more than a whisper—she said she was very tired. But it wasn’t exactly a complaint, more of a statement of fact. My mother, who had never been the kind of Catholic who sat in church pews or wore chains with little crucifixes, had had a priest visit just a few days before.
    I had tried to make sure the priest was as young as possible, so he could make it up all fourteen flights. I found one who did all his rounds on a bike, so that the elevator not working didn’t strike him as a great obstacle. Nonetheless, he was exhausted when he arrived and needed some time to get himself together out on the terrace, looking at the sea and the nearby buildings. He said it gave him a great deal of peace. I told him about my mother, how much she enjoyed it too, and that I’d found a way for her to have pleasant days out on those few square meters. I didn’t tell the priest that we only had a few